A garage door that has jumped its track, dropped a cable or lost a spring is not really a door any more. It is a wall with a car behind it. We repair the mechanism on site: track, rollers, cables, springs, hinges, sections and the way the bottom of the door meets the slab. Most of the garages we work on are older detached buildings, so we check the opening itself as well, because on a structure that has been settling since the 1940s the frame is often the real fault.
Nearly every garage door fault is one of two things: a part that has worn out, or an opening that has moved. The first is a parts job and it is usually finished inside the visit. The second is why a door that has already been repaired twice keeps coming back, and it is the thing most quotes never mention. We check both before pricing anything.
A roller that has climbed out of a spread vertical track. A lift cable unwound off its drum, leaving one side of the door to drop. A spring with no tension left in it, or hinges worn oval after decades of cycles. All of it is visible once somebody gets under the door with a light, and most of it closes out in one visit with parts off the truck. One thing to settle before you book: this page is the mechanism, and the mechanism is its own booking rather than something added to a lock call on the day. Spring, cable, roller, track, section and seal work travels with winding bars, clamps and spring stock on board, so it goes out as a garage door repair. If the door itself runs fine and it is the cylinder, the T-handle or the keys that have gone wrong, that is our garage door lock page and a different visit on the same number.
Which part of the city you are in decides what is behind the door. On the east side almost every block has a lane running behind it, and through Grandview-Woodland, the blocks off Commercial Drive, Hastings-Sunrise and the streets around Clark and Venables the garage or the parking pad sits at the back of the lot and is reached from that lane rather than from the street. Across Main the pattern changes. The lots are larger, the car comes in off the street rather than from behind, and on a Shaughnessy or Dunbar property the overhead door is rarely the only thing on the lot that opens: there is usually a coach house or laneway house behind the main building, a side door off the driveway, and a gate closing the lot at the back. Name the door you mean when you call rather than giving the address and leaving us to guess at it. Then there is the Vancouver with no detached garage in it at all. In Yaletown, in the Oakridge Park towers and in the newer strata along West 70th and West 71st in Marpole, the overhead door is a parkade gate at the bottom of a ramp. It runs on the building's own system alongside the fobs, it belongs to the strata rather than to any one resident, and the call goes to the building manager rather than to us.
A torsion spring carries the weight of the whole door and stays loaded even when the door is shut. Released wrong, it unwinds through a winding bar, a wrist or a face, and it does it faster than anyone reacts. There is no version of this repair that is safe with a socket set and a video, and we would rather turn the job down than talk somebody through one over the phone. The test worth doing is the one that costs nothing: pull the manual release cord and lift the door by hand a foot or two. A balanced door stays roughly where you leave it. A door that feels like it weighs what it actually weighs, or drops the moment you let go, has lost a spring. Put it down, keep the opener off it, and call. We carry winding bars, clamps and springs in a range of sizes, and we replace in matched pairs so the door stays balanced instead of pulling to one corner.
| Repair | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Off-track reset and track straightening | $120–$260 |
| Roller set replacement | $90–$220 |
| Lift cables, replaced as a pair | $110–$240 |
| Torsion spring, single | $180–$340 |
| Torsion springs, matched pair | $260–$480 |
| Section repair or panel replacement | $180–$500+ |
| Bottom seal and weatherstrip | $80–$180 |
| Balance, tune-up and lubrication | $90–$160 |
The cheapest row on that list is the one that catches the others early: a balance check finds a drifting door, a stretching cable or a roller starting to bind before any of them turns into the repair above it. An insulated double door is the heaviest thing on that list and sits near the top of every band. The figure that moves most is section repair, because an older door whose profile stopped being manufactured years ago may have no matching panel left in circulation, and the sourcing is the cost rather than the fitting. Tell us the symptom and roughly when the garage went up and the range narrows on the call rather than after the work.
A garage at the back of a city lot is a small building on its own shallow footing, and it settles on its own schedule, independent of the house at the front. Vancouver hands us plenty of them. The detached houses through Grandview-Woodland and the blocks off Commercial Drive date from the 1910s through the 1940s, so the structures at the lane end of those lots have had eighty years and more to move. The west side runs a little later, the postwar bungalows and stucco character homes of the 1940s and 1950s in Dunbar and the 1920s to 1950s stock in Kerrisdale, and settling on those streets is ordinary enough that misaligned doors and frames are routine work for us there. Once the structure racks even slightly, the two jambs stop being parallel, and a door with entirely sound hardware will rub the high side, wear the rollers unevenly on that side only, and eventually walk out of the track. Fitting new rollers to a racked opening buys a season and then you are back where you started.
The check takes two minutes and a tape. We measure the opening corner to corner, and if the diagonals do not match, the door is not the problem. Sometimes the answer is re-hanging the track to the opening that exists rather than the one the door was built for, which is a repair we can make on the spot. Sometimes the header has sagged or the jamb has rotted at the base, and then it is a carpenter before a door repair is worth paying for, and we will tell you that instead of selling you a parts list. It is also worth knowing how narrow these older garages are. A single built for the cars of the 1940s leaves very little clearance either side of a current vehicle, and most of the bent vertical track and crushed bottom brackets we replace got that way from a mirror or a bumper rather than from age.
The floor of a detached garage is almost always older than the door standing on it, and it was poured by somebody who had no intention of sealing anything against it. Decades on, it has cracked, dished toward one corner or lifted where a root got under it, and a flat rubber seal along the bottom of the door cannot do anything about that. What you get is a seal touching hard at the high point, gaping an inch at the low one, water tracking in on the wet side and one corner of the seal wearing through long before the rest. A taller bulb seal spans a small gap. Past that, the fix is a threshold seal bonded to the slab so the door closes against a raised lip rather than trying to reach the floor, and if the concrete itself has heaved that is concrete work and we will say so rather than fit a third seal to it. These garages are unheated and mostly unsealed, so the parts that rust first are the ones facing down: bottom brackets, the underside of the lowest section, and the cable ends nearest the floor. Where the track allows it we swap rusted steel rollers for sealed nylon and use a grease that has not washed off by January.
A lot of older garages here still run a one-piece tilt-up rather than a sectional. It does not roll up into the ceiling: it pivots on jamb hinges and swings its bottom edge out and up through an arc, which means it needs clear ground in front of it to open at all. On a lot where the apron in front of the door is a shared lane, that clearance is not yours to control. The lane is also the working side of an east-side block, taking the deliveries, the garbage runs and the late closes for everybody on it, so a bin left out or a vehicle pulled up close is enough to stop the door dead or to bend the arm when somebody forces it. The wear points are different too. There are no rollers to replace and very little track to bend. Instead the load runs through the pivot hinges and the jamb-mounted spring arms, and it is the jamb itself that eventually gives, usually at the bottom where the water sits. If somebody has quoted you rollers for a tilt-up door, they have not been to look at it. Converting one to a sectional so the door lifts straight up and the clearance stops mattering is a new door rather than a repair, and it is a different conversation with a different number attached.
Stuck open, stuck closed, off the track, one side dropped, or simply loud. Add roughly when the garage went up and whether the door is a sectional that rolls up into the ceiling or a one-piece that swings out as it lifts. The door type is the part people leave out, and it decides whether this is track and roller work or hinge and pivot work.
A door jammed half open is a different job from one jammed shut: one leaves the garage standing open overnight, the other traps whatever is inside. Tell us which, and tell us if the door is hanging out across a lane that other people need, because that moves you up the day rather than down it.
We make the repair, take the opener off the door and balance it by hand, then run it top to bottom several times to confirm it tracks straight, seats flat on the slab and stops where it should. You watch it work before the truck leaves.
Springs and track are one half of a garage. Locks, keys and the door between the garage and the house are the other half, booked on the same number.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
1/2" steel door, digital keypad, fitted and bolted on site.
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.